Recent news that the Chinese government has allowed the artist
Ai Weiwei to exhibit his work in China for the first time in years has an echo
in the most recent (and probably last) installment of one of crime fiction’s
most successful portrayals of China and the Chinese art world. Lisa Brackmann’s
trio of Ellie McEnroe novels are not murder mysteries, though there’s plenty of
murder and mystery in them. They’re more like exotic adventure novels or
dystopian fantasies rooted in the everyday life of contemporary China. Each of
the novels, Rock Paper Tiger (2010), Hour of the Rat (2013), and
the new Dragon Day (2015), follows a similar pattern, within an overall
story arc. Ellie McEnroe is an expat American, a wounded, PTSD-suffering
Iraq-war veteran (having been a National Guard medic) who follows her husband
to China and then, after a contentious separation from both the husband (who
works for a Blackwater-type security company) and the Christian faith that they
had shared, finds herself drawn into an underground culture of artists and
video gamers.

The narrative is entirely in Ellie’s
conversational, hip, obscene, and occasionally paranoid voice, and the novels
depend entirely on the fact that her voice remains compelling and entertaining
through the whole series. She’s not an action hero, she’s an ordinary woman who
faces ordinary problems as well as extraordinary ones: when her landlady
doubles the rent on her apartment in Beijing, it’s “more than I can afford,
even if I could sell…Zhang’s art again. On my craptastic disability pension? I
could maybe afford the bathroom. But hey, at least my landlady isn’t trying to
kill me or have me arrested, right? At least not so far as I know.” The
narrowing of point of view to Ellie’s own is also a key element in the portrait
of contemporary China: she is an outsider, curious about and sympathetic toward
the people and the rapidly transforming culture but always at its fringes.

Because of her character’s
perspective, Brackmann’s trilogy is quite different from the other prominent crime
series set in China, Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen Cao series, set mostly in
Shanghai. Ellie is based in Beijing but travels frequently to Shanghai and
other Chinese cities and villages, but Chen’s view of the country and his city
are from an insider’s perspective (albeit an insider not comfortable with the
role he has been assigned, a policeman enforcing the power of the Party). Each
of the Chen novels uses the story of a crime to portray not only contemporary
life in China but also the inner mechanisms of the Communist Party as it exerts
its power and control over individuals and the masses. Through Ellie’s eyes,
however, we see only results, with the Party itself hidden behind the erratic
harassment that Ellie, the artists she works with, and others suffer at the
hands of the shadowy security services. The limiting of the perspective to
Ellie’s own gives Brackmann’s novels a more dystopian and paranoid tone, while
Qiu’s stories are more descriptive or sociological, if also a bit pessimistic
about the Chinese system.

Ellie becomes an assistant and
(maybe) girlfriend of an artist with a foot in both the art world and the
gaming world, Zhang Jianli (whose independent attitude suggests that Ai Weiwei
is a model for the character, though Ai himself is also referred to in Dragon
Day). Because of that association, she finds herself on the run across China,
uncertain of which of the people she encounters are friends and which are
enemies — and which are possibly both at the same time. Her paranoia and the
(to American eyes) exotic locales through which she passes drive the sense of
both threat and adventure in the story, while the overarching government
surveillance she encounters and ambiguity of good and evil, friend and foe, and
contrast between reality and pretense power the dystopian surveillance and
terror underlying everything that she experiences. As she walks toward a subway
stop, she says, “when the door of the black Buick parked with two wheels up on
the curb opens in front of me, my first reaction is just to step out of the
way. Then two guys get out, two muscular guys with short haircuts and
nondescript clothes. My heart pounds in my throat. Not this again. ‘Qu
lioaotianr,’ one of them says. Let’s go for a chat. ‘Just for tea,’ the other
says, smiling.” She’s not being arrested, just interrogated about Zhao, who has
himself not been charged with a crime: “That isn’t how things work in China.
First they decide you’re a threat. Then they find a label for it.” When the
cops remind her that “your status here can change at any time,” she tells
herself this could just mean “We’re revoking your visa and kicking you out of
the country” or “We’re throwing your ass in jail. An official prison or a black
jail, off the books.” Her China also takes on some of the qualities of the
science-fiction end of the adventure/dystopia spectrum, in the strange
landscapes and otherworldly cities she passes through. In the new book, for
example, she describes a view of Shanghai’s “old, restored European buildings,
science-fiction skyscrapers lurking behind them like invaders from another
planet, obscured by mist.” Later, searching for one of the many art spaces
popping up in Beijing’s outskirts, she sees a devastated cityscape: “The sky
looks like something out of a science-fiction movie, all yellow, an alien
planet. A plastic bag floats by like an airborne jellyfish.” The shadowy
policemen who keep inviting her for “tea” fit right into these landscapes, and
Ellie’s constant state of anxiety is in keeping with both the interrogators and
the atmosphere.

The first book in the series, Rock
Paper Tiger, is set into motion by a dissident from the Uighur community
who is on the run from the government, and Ellie’s encounter with him puts
Zhang and herself at odds with the Chinese police and security services. Zhang
remains in hiding for most of the rest of the trilogy, hunted by the government
and reachable by Ellie only within a Second-Life-like online game of his own
design. Book two, Hour of the Rat, begins with a request from a former Army
buddy to find his missing brother, leading Ellie into the investigation of the
ecological horrors being visited upon the Chinese people and environment, and
she is battered back and forth among the pervasive government security forces
and the corporations and the activists who are at odds with each other over the
environmental destruction.

Throughout the series, her role as
the missing artist Lao’s official representative gives her a certain cachet
among both the art community and rich collectors. She is also constantly
threatened and/or rescued by a shadowy Chinese cop she calls “Creepy John,”
whose motives for following her may arise from an official assignment or his
own interests, as well as by violent and unscrupulous security contractors
associated with her former husband. Ellie’s mother, only a voice on the phone
in the first novel, arrives in China for a visit in the second and stays,
adopting a Chinese boyfriend and complicating Ellie’s life because she needs to
protect her mother from the forces, public and private, that hover ominously
over her own tenuous life in China.

Dragon Day begins with Ellie obligated to a
wealthy man, Sidney Cao, whose mania for art collecting as well as his capacity
for ruthlessness were a big part of Hour of the Rat. Cao wants a piece
by Lao Zhang, but the artist, still in hiding, refuses to sell anything
(because the government may be building a case for tax fraud against him, a
strategy that the government has indeed adopted in its attacks on artists:
again, Ai Weiwei is the most prominent example, though the government has
recently restored Ai’s right to travel). And now Cao also wants Ellie to
give an opinion of the sleazy and sinister Marsh Brody, an American
entrepreneur who is gaining influence over Cao’s overprivileged son, Gugu. In
the process, she encounters Cao’s other overprivileged children as well as
Uncle Yang, the father-in-law of one of them, an influential, conservative
party member who is worried about changes that may come in the next party
congress, and therefore responds with aggression to Ellie’s attempt to
infiltrate the family.

From Cao’s ghost city, a
millionaire’s dream with as yet no population, to movie studios in the south (where
Gugu is trying his hand as a filmmaker), to upscale clubs and restaurants in
Shanghai and Beijing, and through the contrasting neighborhoods of
still-preserved traditional houses and soulless concrete developments, Ellie
tries to get a fix on two deaths that occur in the circle of Cao’s children,
while also trying to be certain about the motives of the slimy Brody (since she
knows that if she reports her suspicions to him, Cao is fully capable of having
him killed). Plus Zhao announces that he’s coming out of hiding, complicating
her relations with both her wealthy patrons and the representatives of the
state, from Creepy John to the police to Uncle Yang’s thugs.

After the first of the McEnroe
novels, Brackmann published a stand-alone thriller, Getaway, which
follows a young widow who travels to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and her getaway
vacation turns into a getaway of a different sort when she finds herself caught
between an attractive stranger and a violent gang. It’s an effective adventure
story, of the innocent-abroad sort, but its location (while exotic) lacks the
paranoid intensity and political edge of the conflict between the Chinese
surveillance state, the rapacious capitalism, and the artists and ordinary
citizens Ellie encounters in the trilogy.

The plots in the trilogy can meander
a bit, as Ellie travels from place to place and becomes exposed to one threat
after another, and her ongoing concerns (with her safety and with access to the
Percocet she depends on to alleviate her war wounds) are in her thoughts and
her interior monologue repeatedly, but the rambling plots and the repetition
hardly matter: the point is Ellie’s voice and her view of this rapidly
changing, sometimes oppressive, sometimes permissive culture. She is absolutely
convincing, both as a character and as a witness to an unpredictable realm
where past, present, and future constantly collide.